Taking stock of the Good Article backlog
- Wugapodes is a two-time GA Cup participant and WikiCup finalist. Their academic work focuses on the linguistic impacts of group behavior.
Before an English Wikipedia article can achieve good article status (the entry grade among the higher-quality article rankings), it must undergo review by an uninvolved editor. However, the number of articles nominated for review at any given time has outstripped the number of available reviewers for almost as long as the good article nominations process has existed creating a backlog of unreviewed articles. The resulting backlog in the queue of articles waiting to be reviewed has been a perennial concern. Nevertheless, the backlog at Good Article Nominations (GAN) reached its lowest point in two years on 2 July 2016. The culprit was the third annual Good Article Cup, which ended on 30 June 2016; the 2016-2017 GA Cup, its fourth iteration, began on 1 November and is ongoing. The GA Cup is the GA WikiProject's most successful backlog reduction initiative to date, but there is a problem that plagues this and all other backlog elimination drives: editor fatigue.
The backlog at GAN has been growing ever since the process was created, with fluctuations and trends along the way. If the GA Cup, or any elimination drive, is going to be successful, it must at some point begin to treat the cause not simply the symptom. While the GA Cup has done a remarkable job in reducing the backlog, for long term success the cause of the backlog needs to be understood. The cause appears to be editor fatigue, with boom and bust reviewing periods where the core group of reviewers try to reduce the backlog and then tire out, causing the backlog to rebound. This is the chief benefit of the GA Cup: its format helps counteract the cycle of fatigue with a long term motivational structure.
The GA Cup is a multi-round competition modeled on the older and broader-purpose WikiCup (which has run annually since 2007 and concluded this year on 31 October). Members of the GA WikiProject created the GA Cup as a way to encourage editors to review nominations and reduce the backlog through good-natured competition. Participants are awarded points for reviewing good article nominations, with more points being awarded the longer a nomination has languished in the queue. Each GA Cup sees a significant reduction in the number of nominations awaiting review. On this metric alone the GA Cup is a success; but counting raw articles awaiting review only gives insight into what happens while the GA Cup is running, ignoring the origin of the backlog and masking ways in which the GA Cup can be further improved.
The GA Cup's predecessors, backlog elimination drives, only lasted a month, while the GA Cup lasts four. While the time commitment alone can be a source of fatigue, the mismatch between the time taken to review and the ease of nomination can lead to an unmanageable workload. A good article review nominally takes 7 days, so if the rate of closing reviews is less than the rate of nominations added, the backlog will not only increase, but the number of reviews being done by a given reviewer will balloon, causing them to burn out by the end of the competition. Well-known post-cup backlog spikes demonstrate the oft temporary nature of GA Cup efforts.
With proper information and planning, the GA Cup can begin to treat the cause of the backlog rather than the symptom and succeed in sustaining backlog reductions after its conclusion.